TeXFindPkg tool for querying or installing TeX packages

Description: Query or Install TeX packages and their dependencies
Copyright: 2023-2024 (c) Jianrui Lyu <[email protected]>
Repository: https://github.com/lvjr/texfindpkg
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

1. Introduction

TeXFindPkg makes it easy to query or install TeX packages and their dependencies by file names, command names or environment names. It supports both TeXLive and MiKTeX distributions. At present it focuses mainly on LaTeX packages, but may extend to ConTeXt packages if anyone would like to contribute.

2. Installation

Normally your TeX distribution will copy TeXFindPkg files and create a binary file texfindpkg when you install this package. If a manual installation is needed, you could copy TeXFindPkg files to TEXMF tree as follows:

Package file	Where to install it
texfindpkg.1	TEXMF/doc/man/man1/texfindpkg.1
README.md	TEXMF/doc/support/texfindpkg/README.md
texfindpkg.lua	TEXMF/scripts/texfindpkg/texfindpkg.lua
texfindpkg.json.gz	TEXMF/tex/latex/texfindpkg/texfindpkg.json.gz
tfpbuild.lua	TEXMF/source/texfindpkg/tfpbuild.lua

Then you could create a symbolic link from /usr/local/bin/texfindpkg to path/to/texfindpkg.lua on Linux or MacOS, or create a batch file texfindpkg.bat in binary folder of the TeX distribution with these lines on Windows:

@echo off
texlua path\to\texfindpkg.lua %*

3. Usage

After installing TeXFindPkg, you can run it by executing

texfindpkg <action> [<option>] [<name>]

The <action> could be query, install, help or version. The leading dashes in any <action> will be removed first.

For query action, you pass -c, -e, -f or -p as <option> to indicate the following <name> is a command name, environment name, file name or package name. For example (for -f option, you can omit file extension in the name if it is .sty),

• texfindpkg query -c fakeverb means querying package with command \fakeverb;
• texfindpkg query -e frame means querying package with environment {frame};
• texfindpkg query -f array.sty means querying package with file array.sty;
• texfindpkg query -p caption means querying LaTeX packages in TeXLive/MiKTeX package caption.

You can query a lot of names in one go. For example,

texfindpkg query -c fakeverb -e verbatim tblr -f array longtable -p caption

When you have a lot of names to query, you may want to list them in a file and use -i option to insert them. For example, if you have a file input.txt of lines (comments starting with # characters are ignored in it)

-c
fakeverb
-e
verbatim
tblr
-f
array
longtable
-p
caption

then the following command produces the same result as the previous one does:

texfindpkg query -i input.txt

Furthermore you can save total dependent list of packages to a file with -o option:

texfindpkg query -i input.txt -o output.txt

With -i and -o options, it is quite easy to install a minimal TeXLive distribution with all dependencies resolved, which is useful for you to run regression tests with GitHub Actions if you are a package writer. Please see latex-package.txt and texlive-package.txt in tabularray repository for a practical example.

The only difference between query and install actions is that with install action TeXFindPkg will install missing TeXLive or MiKTeX packages at the end.

With help action, TeXFindPkg prints help message and exit. With version action, TeXFindPkg prints version information and exit.

4. Building

TeXFindPkg uses completion files of TeXstudio editor which are in completion folder of TeXstudio repository.

After putting completion folder into current folder, you can execute texlua tfpbuild.lua generate to generate texfindpkg.json and texfindpkg.json.gz files.

5. Contributing

Any updates of dependencies, commands or environments for packages should be contributed directly to TeXstudio project.